Page 70 of In a Haze

“I…I’m feeling uneasy about this whole thing.”

He nods. “Yeah, makes sense.” Turning around, he slides the back door open to the van and pulls on Don, and I force myself to relax. Don is struggling. Joe says, “Man, I can knock your sorry ass out again if you want.”

“You think anyone will believe you? A street punk and a self-harming mental patient? And what exactly do you think Catherine will tell you? She won’t say shit to you.”

“Fuck it,” Joe says, palming Don’s head before he can even dodge and slamming it into the door.

Over and over again until Don once more loses consciousness.

I think I’m going to be sick.

Joe says to me, “Sorry. He had it coming.” I frown but say nothing. “I was hoping we could use him to get the doc’s attention, but I guess that’s not happening.”

“At least we know for sure it’s Dr. Wilson.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s true.” Then he sits just inside the van, his legs touching the concrete floor of the garage.

It’s tense and quiet in that parking garage and, after a few seconds, I hear a car engine and tires moving on the concrete a floor or two below. From where we stand, the only way they’ll see us is if they’re looking in their rearview mirror. Even then we might be hard to spot as the other two vans might block us.

It’s then that I say, “Don didn’t say exactly where in the garage they met.”

“Then I guess we need to pay attention to the cars coming in.” Fortunately, we’re close to the entrance. Joe gets up then and I move out of the way as he gets closer to the back of the van. Seconds later, the car I heard below drives past, exiting out the door once it’s raised enough.

I glance at unconscious Don, wondering what I ever saw in the man. Then I look over at Joe. His back is to me, but I can also see the side of his face. In just a few short days, perhaps based on years that I don’t remember, I’ve fallen deeply in love with that man, and it’s killing me that I can’t trust him. I want to believe him, want to trust that he’s been completely honest with me, but there are too many red flags.

And I don’t know why I’m even worried about that right now. Probably because we’re in a lull time and there’s not a damn thing I can do until the psychiatrist gets here. I can’t think about the future, can’t think about what will happen if we can’t convince the authorities.

When the exterior garage door opens, I get closer to Joe. It’s a black truck with big tires and we see through the windshield that it’s driven by a burly looking guy with facial hair.

Not Dr. Wilson.

Five minutes pass before a tiny silver car with an equally tiny blonde woman passes through. Just minutes later comes a burgundy sedan—and through the windshield I see the person we’re looking for.

Without hesitation, Joe jumps out and Dr. Wilson slams on the brakes, making a squealing sound on the concrete. She gets out of the car and says, “What are you doing down here?”

“We have Donald Clawson over here in the van.”

Dr. Wilson’s already pale face turns even pastier. “What do you mean youhavehim?”

“I mean you’ll have to come over here to talk to him. He’s tied up at the moment.”

“Jesus.” She leaves her car running, the door open, and Joe brings her over—but she’s smart. She doesn’t allow herself to be completely trapped between us and the two vans. It’s also possible that her girth makes her uncomfortable in snug spaces, but I’m guessing it’s that she’s thinking. When she sees Don’s legs, she asks, “Why isn’t he moving?” If she got closer, she’d see his bloody head.

“He was being an asshole, so I knocked him out.”

“What’s going on here?”

Joe’s done all the talking up to this point, but now it’s my turn. “Dr. Wilson,” I say, and she finally looks at me. The expression on her face tells me so much. She despises me, resents me, and I don’t understand why. Perhaps because I became her burden instead of Don’s. But I’m not going to ask her about any of that. “I need you to connect some dots for us, help us puzzle out some things we don’t understand. We know that, approximately two years ago, my husband had a teenage girl restrained in my basement. When I found out, he poisoned me.” I don’t know if the wordpoisonedis exactly accurate, but I don’t care. He incapacitated me somehow by putting an unknown substance in my drink. The wordpoisonedworks.

“Later that night, he brought me and the girl to you and somehow you managed to erase all my memories. I don’t know what happened to the girl, but I know you also have a file on her and lots of other young girls.”

Dr. Wilson has a sneer on her face, but her lips are clamped shut. The garage door opens and a blue hatchback pauses inside the doorway and starts honking. Joe says, “I got this.” Dr. Wilson doesn’t even respond as he runs over to her car and pulls it to the side, shutting off the engine and closing the door while the other car moves around.

Dr. Wilson says, “I don’t know what you think I have to do with any of this.”

This woman holds the key to all my missing memories, and I’m ready to do to her what Joe did to Don—torture her until she talks. But I’m not going to. Instead, I’m going to try to appeal to her reason. “We have evidence against you, so you might as well spit it out. One, we know you and Don were working together. Two, we know you were taking in girls he brought to you. Three, we know you erased my memory because of what I knew about it.”

“Just what evidence do you have?” she asks as Joe rejoins us.

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